Spantastic - a bridge to our senses

John King ("Bridge artwork dazzles - but novelty fades," March 10) feels that the Bay Bridge light show is cool beyond measure. Ethereal, even.

Yet he immediately foresees a time when the lights lose their luster, when heavenly gossamer is not vogue. Now that the lights are 6 days old, he has pronounced them obsolete and, worse, incongruous with the mass of the bridge.

King appreciates only the power that scale and materials give the bridge. As the sun emphasizes the giant steel and concrete structure, it also creates a shadow of the bridge. Mariners and those on the Embarcadero experience this two-dimensional aspect of the bridge by day. At night, the bridge becomes the shadow. This reversal is brought to our attention by the LEDs.

While King sees the lights accentuating the least essential part of the composition, I see the lights consistent with the transformation of day to night, of bridge to shadow, and find the nocturnal attention on the slight suspender cables harmonious with these changes.

King's criticism sees a Hamm's billboard begging for attention and doomed to disappear, and misses the refined enhancement of our perceptions and the comment on the transitory nature of all things.

Shultz vs. fracking

For years now, Republican leaders and their corporate paymasters in the oil and gas industry have promoted the environmentally damaging process of fracking as a source of cheap domestic energy.

So it might come as a shock to some that the plan now is to build export terminals to ship this natural gas overseas, and by doing so raise its current low price. ("Natural gas could compere with crude," Business, March 9)

It would be far better if such politicians took the advice of one of their own, George Shultz, and pass a carbon tax and give the proceeds back to the citizens in the form of a dividend check, thus encouraging companies to leave the oil and gas in the ground where it will never contribute to global warming.

Protect the river

Thank you for shedding light on Merced Irrigation District's intent to eliminate protections on the lower stretch of the iconic Merced River, which Congress protected in perpetuity to preserve its free-flowing character - notably, with unanimous support of the Modesto Irrigation District board in 1992.

Rolling back national Wild and Scenic River protections put in place to balance America's aggressive and destructive dam-building era to ironically allow for an expanded New Exchequer Reservoir would set an unacceptable precedent, sure to be followed by a flood of similar proposals nationwide.

Equally disturbing, inundation of an enlarged reservoir would flood crucial habitat for limestone salamanders, undoubtedly killing an untold number of one of California's rarest creatures. These salamanders are found nowhere else on Earth outside the lower reaches of the Merced River watershed, including alongside Lake McClure. Limestone salamanders are a fully protected species, so killing them is not only needless, it violates state law.

Precedent-setting rollbacks of our national Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and wanton killing of one of California's rarest amphibians for literally a drop in the bucket? This project should be dead in the water.

They're still protecting us from yogurt

Concerning the new policy of the Transportation Security Administration on the allowance of small knives: I have never really understood their rules. ("Sharp response to TSA's relaxed limits on knives," March 10)

I once had my yogurt taken away. "Yogurt is forbidden," the Gestapo-like voice informed me. Yet I was twice allowed to wear a Christmas pin on my coat, a pin with a very sharp point. Perhaps TSA stands for "taboos simply arbitrary."